I told my three sons we were going on a treasure hunt. What I did not tell them was that there was no treasure. I had not hidden anything; I had not prepared any clues, and honestly, I did not even have a plan. I simply had three energetic boys, aged eight, four, and two and a half, running around the house, and I needed to give all that energy somewhere to go. So, with three curious faces looking at me, I made up a rule on the spot: we had to find trees with fruit on them, and the fruit had to be visible from where we were standing. No climbing, no guessing, no touching the fruit. Just looking. That was it. We stepped outside without knowing where we were going or what we would find, and somehow that made the walk more interesting. We found a banana tree, a small pomegranate tree and an imli tree, which my eldest announced with the excitement of someone who had discovered something extraordinary. We also found a neem tree, but the fruit was so tiny that it led to a serious discussion about whether it should count as treasure, and the boys eventually decided that it did not. The rules, although invented only minutes earlier, were being followed with surprising seriousness.
As we continued walking, I started thinking about how easily we miss things that are right in front of us. I have probably walked past those same trees dozens of times without stopping to ask what they were, whether they had fruit, or what season they were in. The boys had turned an ordinary walk into a little expedition simply because I had given them a reason to look. It made me wonder how much of life works the same way. Sometimes the world does not necessarily become more interesting; we simply become more attentive to it. A tree that was always there suddenly becomes a discovery, an old building becomes a mystery, and a signboard becomes a puzzle. Perhaps this is one of the beautiful things about childhood: children have not yet become as good as we adults are at filtering the world out. Everything can still be worth noticing. And as a father, I sometimes feel that I am not really trying to teach my children something new; I am trying to make sure they do not lose the ability to notice the things that are already there.
Looking at the world differently
The following weekend, I changed the treasure hunt. This time, I told them to find a big letter W somewhere in the neighbourhood, something they could see from a distance. We walked around looking at signboards, buildings, shops and anything else that might contain the letter. My eight-year-old spotted a W on a billboard quite quickly, but then he found another one hidden among a complicated mess of cables between two poles, and somehow that one became more exciting than the billboard. For the next hour, they kept looking up and pointing things out to each other. Somewhere along the way, I realised that none of them had asked for my phone. That small observation stayed with me. We often talk about children being distracted by screens, but perhaps sometimes the answer is not simply to take something away. Maybe we also need to give them something worth looking at. A little curiosity can compete with a screen in ways that another lecture about screen time cannot. The neighbourhood suddenly had signs, trees, animals, buildings, letters and stories hidden everywhere, and all I had done was ask a different question.
It also reminded me of something I often think about when I look at my children. Allah swt has given children such a natural ability to be amazed by small things. A bird sitting on a wire can hold their attention longer than an expensive toy. A puddle can become an entire afternoon's entertainment. A small insect can bring everyone to a complete standstill. As adults, we slowly become efficient at ignoring these things because we have meetings, deadlines, bills, responsibilities, and a hundred other thoughts occupying our minds. Perhaps one of the gifts children give us is the opportunity to slow down and see the world through their eyes again. They make us notice things we had stopped noticing. And sometimes, while thinking that we are taking them out to experience something, we realise that they are the ones teaching us to experience it.
The turf, the park and the road
On weekends when I play football on a turf near home, I usually take my two older boys with me. They do not really play; they sit at the edge and watch, and during the breaks they jump onto the turf and run around in circles for absolutely no reason. There is something wonderfully innocent about watching children run simply because they can. We also try to visit a park every weekend, and I have made it a small habit not to keep going to the same one. Over time, we have visited quite a few parks around Hyderabad, and we do something similar whenever we are in Kolkata. My wife takes our youngest to the park almost every day because the older two have evening classes and often miss the weekday trips. I sometimes think about that little difference between the three of them, about how parenting three children at different ages means that fairness does not always look like giving everyone exactly the same thing. Sometimes one gets the weekday park, another gets the football turf, and another gets an extra story before bed. You keep adjusting, trying to give each child what they need at that particular stage of their life.
On one of our Sunday cycle rides, we started counting every dog and cat we saw. There was no prize and no real purpose to the exercise, but the tally became very serious. Every few minutes someone would shout that they had spotted another dog or cat, and the count would start again if someone disagreed. On our walks, we have also started noticing abandoned buildings and half-finished houses, the kind with staircases leading to nowhere and grass growing through the unfinished floors. I sometimes make up stories about them and tell the boys that perhaps a family was supposed to live there, or perhaps the owner moved away, or maybe the construction stopped because something happened. None of it is necessarily true, and they know that I am making up some of it, but they still ask questions and add their own ideas. For a few minutes, an abandoned building becomes a story rather than just another building we walk past. I think there is something valuable in that kind of imagination, because not everything in childhood needs to have a learning objective attached to it. Sometimes it is enough for a child to wonder.
It isn't always picture-perfect
Of course, this kind of childhood adventure does not always go according to plan. On one of our walks, a stray dog started barking aggressively at my middle son, and I had to move quickly and get between them. For those few moments, my heart was somewhere near my throat. It was a good reminder that the world outside our homes is real, and real means that there are risks too. There are dogs, traffic, uneven roads, open spaces and half-built buildings, and as parents we cannot simply ignore those things in the name of giving children freedom. I am not trying to romanticise danger, and I certainly do not want my children to learn about risk the hard way. But I have started wondering whether there is a difference between keeping children safe and trying to make childhood completely predictable. We can protect them without arranging every minute of their lives. We can teach them to be careful without making the entire world feel frightening. There is a certain kind of learning that happens only when a child is allowed to look, explore, ask questions, and occasionally encounter something they did not expect. Perhaps the goal is not to remove every risk, but to help them slowly learn how to recognise and navigate it. That feels much closer to preparing them for life than simply keeping everything around them controlled.
What am I really trying to give them?
None of these afternoons will appear on a school report card. Finding a pomegranate tree will not make my son better at mathematics, and counting dogs and cats will not earn him a certificate. But I think something else is happening, something that is much harder to measure. They are learning to look up, to pay attention, to notice a tree they may have walked past many times, to wonder why a building was abandoned, and to turn an ordinary walk into something memorable. I am not doing these things because I want my children to become experts at identifying trees or letters on billboards. I think I am trying to give them something much simpler: a childhood with enough small moments that they will have something to remember. We spend so much of our time as parents trying to give our children the best education, the right activities, good food, good clothes, good schools, and every opportunity we can afford. All of that matters, but sometimes I wonder whether we underestimate the value of ordinary time spent together. A walk with no destination, a silly game made up on the spot, a conversation about a stray dog or an abandoned house - these things cost almost nothing, but they may quietly become some of the memories that stay with us. And perhaps this is also a form of shukr, of gratitude, because when we slow down enough to notice the ordinary blessings around us, we begin to realise how much has already been given to us.
I imagine my sons twenty/thirty years from now, when they have families of their own and their childhood is something they can only reach through memories. I know they will not remember everything we did, and they certainly will not remember most of the things I spent so much time worrying about as a father. They may not remember the exact parks we visited, the football turfs we went to, or how many times I told them to keep their shoes outside the house. But I hope they remember the feeling of those afternoons. I hope one of them remembers a father who occasionally said, “Come, let's go,” without having a very good reason. I hope he remembers walking through the neighbourhood looking for fruit on trees, the excitement of finding an imli tree, and the serious argument over whether a tiny neem fruit was good enough to qualify as treasure. I hope he remembers that sometimes we went outside simply to see what we could find. And perhaps one day, when he has children of his own, he might take them out for a walk and invent a little game of his own, without worrying too much about whether it is educational or productive or Instagram-worthy. Maybe that is when I will know that these small moments mattered.
There was no treasure that day. I had promised my sons a treasure hunt without actually having any treasure to give them. But we found a banana tree, a pomegranate tree and an imli tree. We found a neem tree that failed the test. We found laughter, arguments, stories, and a few hours where three boys were simply outside, looking at the world around them. And the more I think about it, the more I feel that perhaps the treasure was never something I was supposed to hide for them to find. Perhaps it was already there - in the trees Allah swt had planted, in the streets we had walked past without noticing, in their laughter, and in the simple privilege of having these three little boys call me “Abbu” and ask me to come along. Maybe that is what childhood teaches us, if we are paying attention: that some of the most valuable things in life are not the things we plan, buy, or achieve. They are the ordinary moments we almost miss, until one day we look back and realise they were never ordinary at all.
